Crown Heights (2017)

Ghost in the Cell

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

If anyone is on the verge of becoming a breakout star, it's Lakeith Stanfield, and his role in Crown Heights — opening Friday in Bay Area theaters — could put him over the top.

Lanky of frame and with deeply expressive eyes, Stanfield has, over a short time, appeared in quality films like Short Term 12, Selma, Dope, Straight Outta Compton (as Snoop Dogg), and Get Out, as well as on the acclaimed TV series Atlanta.

Now he has his biggest role yet. In Crown Heights, which is based on a true story, he plays Colin Warner, a Trinidad-born, Brooklyn-raised man who was inexplicably arrested for a 1980 murder he had nothing to do with.

The movie shows his innocence with an air-tight alibi; he was stealing a car to pick up his mother's TV from the repair shop.

This is no clever Fritz Lang film noir about a man wrongly accused. Colin is run through the system with more brute force than efficiency. Where the facts don't quite fit, they are violently crushed and crammed until a conviction can be made.

On the outside, Colin's best friend Carl King (Nnamdi Asomugha) works tirelessly to get him out, even training to become a process server.

Why does Carl do this? His response to Colin in one scene makes it all clear: "It could be me in here."

Nevertheless, the movie, written and directed by Matt Ruskin, does skimp on certain life details.

In one scene, Carl forgets to pick up his daughter from school, and in another, his wife (Marsha Stephanie Blake) discovers that he has taken out a line of credit to pay for a lawyer. Nothing comes of these moments. There's no time for follow-up.

Colin even manages to get married while serving his 21 unjust years, to a childhood friend, Antoinette (Natalie Paul), but, of this relationship, the movie likewise conveys more details than romance.

Colin's predicament was most certainly based on race, a dramatic illustration of the themes in Ava Duvernay's recent documentary 13th. But while the movie acknowledges the general inequality of blacks and whites in the system, it never preaches or lays anything on too thick. It simply allows things to be.

The heart of the movie comes from Stanfield, aging twenty years, and using his powerful eyes to express the sheer, hopeless horror of his situation.

When a guard cuts short Colin's phone call to his grandma on her birthday, it's hard to see the moment as anything but vicious and cruel.

He is a human being, sensitive, and loving, but trapped and nearly destroyed. With his profound performance, Stanfield brings Crown Heights inside an unimaginable human experience.